ADAMS, Douglas - Life, the Universe, and Everything
Page 15
imaginatively, and also, it seemed, to be shocked.
The Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax were engaged in one of their regular
wars with the Strenuous Garfighters of Stug, and were not enjoying it as much
as usual because it involved an awful lot of trekking through the Radiation
Swamps of Cwulzenda, and across the Fire Mountains of Frazfraga, neither of
which terrains they felt at home in.
So when the Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak joined in the fray and
forced them to fight another front in the Gamma Caves of Carfrax and the Ice
Storms of Varlengooten, they decided that enough was enough, and they ordered
Hactar to design for them an Ultimate Weapon.
"What do you mean," asked Hactar, "by Ultimate?"
To which the Silastic Armorfiends of Striterax said, "Read a bloody
dictionary," and plunged back into the fray.
So Hactar designed an Ultimate Weapon.
It was a very, very small bomb which was simply a junction box in
hyperspace that would, when activated, connect the heart of every major sun
with the heart of every other major sun simultaneously and thus turn the
entire Universe in to one gigantic hyperspatial supernova.
When the Silastic Armorfiends tried to use it to blow up a Strangulous
Stilettan munitions dump in one of the Gamma Caves, they were extremely
irritated that it didn't work, and said so.
Hactar had been shocked by the whole idea.
He tried to explain that he had been thinking about this Ultimate Weapon
business, and had worked out that there was no conceivable consequence of not
setting the bomb off that was worse than the known consequence of setting it
off, and he had therefore taken the liberty of introducing a small flaw into
the design of the bomb, and he hoped that everyone involved would, on sober
reflection, feel that ...
The Silastic Armorfiends disagreed and pulverized the computer.
Later they thought better of it, and destroyed the faulty bomb as well.
Then, pausing only to smash the hell out of the Strenuous Garfighters of
Stug, and the Strangulous Stilettans of Jajazikstak, they went on to find an
entirely new way of blowing themselves up, which was a profound relief to
everyone else in the Galaxy, particularly the Garfighters, the Stilettans and
the potatoes.
Trillian had watched all this, as well as the story of Krikkit. She
emerged from the Room of informational Illusions thoughtfully, just in time to
discover that they had arrived too late.
Chapter 25
Even as the Starship Bistromath flickered into objective being on the top
of a small cliff on the mile-wide asteroid which pursued a lonely and eternal
path in orbit around the enclosed star system of Krikkit, its crew was aware
that they were in time only to be witnesses to an unstoppable historic event.
They didn't realize they were going to see two.
They stood cold, lonely and helpless on the cliff edge and watched the
activity below. Lances of light wheeled in sinister arcs against the void from
a point only about a hundred yards below and in front of them.
They stared into the blinding event.
An extension of the ship's field enabled them to stand there, by once
again exploiting the mind's predisposition to have tricks played on it: the
problems of falling up off the tiny mass of the asteroid, or of not being able
to breathe, simply became Somebody Else's.
The white Krikkit warship was parked amongst the stark grey crags of the
asteroid, alternately flaring under arclights or disappearing in shadow. The
blackness of the shaped shadows cast by the hard rocks danced together in wild
choreography as the arclights swept round them.
The eleven white robots were bearing, in procession, the Wikkit Key out
into the middle of a circle of swinging lights.
The Wikkit Key was rebuilt. Its components shone and glittered: the Steel
Pillar (or Marvin's leg) of Strength and Power, the Gold Bail (or Heart of the
Improbability Drive) of Prosperity, the Perspex Pillar (or Argabuthon Sceptre
of Justice) of Science and Reason, the Silver Bail (or Rory Award for The Most
Gratuitous Use Of The Word "Fuck" In A Serious Screenplay) and the now
reconstituted Wooden Pillar (or Ashes of a burnt stump signifying the death of
English cricket) of Nature and Spirituality.
"I suppose there is nothing we can do at this point?" asked Arthur
nervously.
"No," sighed Slartibartfast.
The expression of disappointment which crossed Arthur's face was a
complete failure, and, since he was standing obscured by shadow, he allowed it
to collapse into one of relief.
"Pity," he said.
"We have no weapons," said Slartibartfast, "stupidly."
"Damn," said Arthur very quietly.
Ford said nothing.
Trillian said nothing, but in a peculiarly thoughtful and distinct way.
She was staring at the blankness of the space beyond the asteroid.
The asteroid circled the Dust Cloud which surrounded the Slo-Time envelope
which enclosed the world on which lived the people of Krikkit, the Masters of
Krikkit and their killer robots.
The helpless group had no way of knowing whether or not the Krikkit robots
were aware of their presence. They could only assume that they must be, but
that they felt, quite rightly in the circumstances, that they had nothing to
fear. They had an historic task to perform, and their audience could be
regarded with contempt.
"Terrible impotent feeling, isn't it?" said Arthur, but the others ignored
him.
In the centre of the area of light which the robots were approaching, a
square-shaped crack appeared in the ground. The crack defined itself more and
more distinctly, and soon it became clear that a block of the ground, about
six feet square, was slowly rising.
At the same time they became aware of some other movement, but it was
almost sublimal, and for a moment or two it was not clear what it was that was
moving.
Then it became clear.
The asteroid was moving. It was moving slowly in towards the Dust Cloud,
as if being hauled in inexorably by some celestial angler in its depths.
They were to make in real life the journey through the Cloud which they
had already made in the Room of Informational Illusions. They stood frozen in
silence. Trillian frowned.
An age seemed to pass. Events seemed to pass with spinning slowness, as
the leading edge of the asteroid passed into the vague and soft outer
perimeter of the Cloud.
And soon they were engulfed in a thin and dancing obscurity. They passed
on through it, on and on, dimly aware of vague shapes and whorls
indistinguishable in the darkness except in the corner of the eye.
The Dust dimmed the shafts of brilliant light. The shafts of brilliant
light twinkled on the myriad specks of Dust.
Trillian, again, regarded the passage from within her own frowning
thoughts.
And they were through it. Whether it had taken a minute or half an hour
they weren't sure, but they were through it and confronted with a fresh
blankness, as if space were pinched
out of existence in front of them.
And now things moved quickly.
A blinding shaft of light seemed almost to explode from out of the block
which had risen three feet out of the ground, and out of that rose a smaller
Perspex block, dazzling with interior dancing colours.
The block was slotted with deep groves, three upright and two across,
clearly designed to accept the Wikkit key.
The robots approached the Lock, slotted the Key into its home and stepped
back again. The block twisted round of is own accord, and space began to
alter.
As space unpinched itself, it seemed agonizingly to twist the eyes of the
watchers in their sockets. They found themselves staring, blinded, at an
unravelled sun which stood now before them where it seemed only seconds before
there had not been even empty space. It was a second or two before they were
even sufficiently aware of what had happened to throw their hands up over
their horrified blinded eyes. In that second or two, they were aware of a tiny
speck moving slowly across the eye of that sun.
They staggered back, and heard ringing in their ears the thin and
unexpected chant of the robots crying out in unison.
"Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit! Krikkit!"
The sound chilled them. It was harsh, it was cold, it was empty, it was
mechanically dismal.
It was also triumphant.
They were so stunned by these two sensory shocks that they almost missed
the second historic event.
Zaphod Beeblebrox, the only man in history to survive a direct blast
attack from the Krikkit robots, ran out of the Krikkit warship brandishing a
Zap gun.
"OK," he cried, "the situation is totally under control as of this moment
in time."
The single robot guarding the hatchway to the ship silently swung his
battleclub, and connected it with the back of Zaphod's left head.
"Who the zark did that?" said the left head, and lolled sickeningly
forward.
His right head gazed keenly into the middle distance.
"Who did what?" it said.
The club connected with the back of his right head.
Zaphod measured his length as a rather strange shape on the ground.
Within a matter of seconds the whole event was over. A few blasts from the
robots were sufficient to destroy the Lock for ever. It split and melted and
splayed its contents brokenly. The robots marched grimly and, it almost
seemed, in a slightly disheartened manner, back into their warship which, with
a "foop", was gone.
Trillian and Ford ran hectically round and down the steep incline to the
dark, still body of Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Chapter 26
"I don't know," said Zaphod, for what seemed to him like the thirty+
seventh time, "they could have killed me, but they didn't. Maybe they just
thought I was a kind of wonderful guy or something. I could understand that."
The others silently registered their opinions of this theory.
Zaphod lay on the cold floor of the flight deck. His back seemed to
wrestle the floor as pain thudded through him and banged at his heads.
"I think," he whispered, "that there is something wrong with those
anodized dudes, something fundamentally weird."
"They are programmed to kill everybody," Slartibartfast pointed out.
"That," wheezed Zaphod between the whacking thuds, "could be it." He
didn't seem altogether convinced.
"Hey, baby," he said to Trillian, hoping this would make up for his
previous behaviour.
"You all right?" she said gently.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm fine."
"Good," she said, and walked away to think. She stared at the huge
visiscreen over the flight couches and, twisting a switch, she flipped local
images over it. One image was the blankness of the Dust Cloud. One was the sun
of Krikkit. One was Krikkit itself. She flipped between them fiercely.
"Well, that's goodbye Galaxy, then," said Arthur, slapping his knees and
standing up.
"No," said Slartibartfast, gravely. "Our course is clear." He furrowed his
brow until you could grow some of the smaller root vegetables in it. He stood
up, he paced around. When he spoke again, what he said frightened him so much
he had to sit down again.
"We must go down to Krikkit," he said. A deep sigh shook his old frame and
his eyes seemed almost to rattle in their sockets.
"Once again," he said, "we have failed pathetically. Quite pathetically."
"That," said Ford quietly, "is because we don't care enough. I told you."
He swung his feet up on the instrument panel and picked fitfully at
something on one of his fingernails.
"But unless we determine to take action," said the old man querulously, as
if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, "then we
shall all be destroyed, we shall all die. Surely we care about that?"
"Not enough to want to get killed over it," said Ford. He put on a sort of
hollow smile and flipped it round the room at anyone who wanted to see it.
Slartibartfast clearly found this point of view extremely seductive and he
fought against it. He turned again to Zaphod who was gritting his teeth and
sweating with the pain.
"You surely must have some idea," he said, "of why they spared your life.
It seems most strange and unusual."
"I kind of think they didn't even know," shrugged Zaphod. "I told you.
They hit me with the most feeble blast, just knocked me out, right? They
lugged me into their ship, dumped me into a corner and ignored me. Like they
were embarrassed about me being there. If I said anything they knocked me out
again. We had some great conversations. `Hey ... ugh!' `Hi there ... ugh!' `I
wonder ...ugh!' Kept me amused for hours, you know." He winced again.
He was toying with something in his fingers. He held it up. It was the
Gold Bail - the Heart of Gold, the heart of the Infinite Improbability Drive.
Only that and the Wooden Pillar had survived the destruction of the Lock
intact.
"I hear your ship can move a bit," he said. "So how would you like to zip
me back to mine before you ..."
"Will you not help us?" said Slartibartfast.
"I'd love to stay and help you save the Galaxy," insisted Zaphod, rising
himself up on to his shoulders, "but I have the mother and father of a pair of
headaches, and I feel a lot of little headaches coming on. But next time it
needs saving, I'm your guy. Hey, Trillian baby?"
She looked round briefly.
"Yes?"
"You want to come? Heart of Gold? Excitement and adventure and really wild
things?"
"I'm going down to Krikkit," she said.
Chapter 27
It was the same hill, and yet not the same.
This time it was not an Informational Illusion. This was Krikkit itself
and they were standing on it. Near them, behind the trees, stood the strange
Italian restaurant which had brought these, their real bodies, to this, the
real, present world of Krikkit.
The strong grass under their feet was real, the rich soil real too. The
heady fragrances from the tree, too, were real. The night was real night.
Krikkit.
<
br /> Possibly the most dangerous place in the Galaxy for anyone who isn't a
Krikkiter to stand. The place that could not countenance the existence of any
other place, whose charming, delightful, intelligent inhabitants would howl
with fear, savagery and murderous hate when confronted with anyone not their
own.
Arthur shuddered.
Slartibartfast shuddered.
Ford, surprisingly, shuddered.
It was not surprising that he shuddered, it was surprising that he was
there at all. But when they had returned Zaphod to his ship Ford had felt
unexpectedly shamed into not running away.
Wrong, he thought to himself, wrong wrong wrong. He hugged to himself one
of the Zap guns with which they had armed themselves out of Zaphod's armoury.
Trillian shuddered, and frowned as she looked into the sky.
This, too, was not the same. It was no longer blank and empty.
Whilst the countryside around them had changed little in the two thousand
years of the Krikkit wars, and the mere five years that had elapsed locally
since Krikkit was sealed in its Slo-Time envelope ten billion years ago, the
sky was dramatically different.
Dim lights and heavy shapes hung in it.
High in the sky, where no Krikkiter ever looked, were the War Zones, the
Robot Zones - huge warships and tower blocks floating in the Nil-O-Grav fields
far above the idyllic pastoral lands of the surface of Krikkit.
Trillian stared at them and thought.
"Trillian," whispered Ford Prefect to her.
"Yes?" she said.
"What are you doing?"
"Thinking."
"Do you always breathe like that when you're thinking?"
"I wasn't aware that I was breathing."
"That's what worried me."
"I think I know ..." said Trillian.
"Shhhh!" said Slartibartfast in alarm, and his thin trembling hand
motioned them further back beneath the shadow of the tree.
Suddenly, as before in the tape, there were lights coming along the hill
path, but this time the dancing beams were not from lanterns but electric
torches - not in itself a dramatic change, but every detail made their hearts
thump with fear. This time there were no lilting whimsical songs about flowers
and farming and dead dogs, but hushed voices in urgent debate.
A light moved in the sky with slow weight. Arthur was clenched with a